The first album by The Wombats, the 2007 release “A Guide to Love, Loss and Desperation,” was a fun burst of youthful enthusiasm. It didn’t require a lot of thinking with its simple, frenetic guitar chords and lyrics focusing on dancing and strippers and girls in short skirts.

More than four years later, the British trio finally produced its follow-up, “This Modern Glitch.” The band took that long, according to vocalist/guitarist Matthew “Murph” Murphy, because it needed to do a bit of reinvention.

“At the end of the first album I was definitely kind of feeling that I didn’t want us to be the party band, if you know what I mean. I was pretty sure that we had more in ourselves than that,” Murphy said in a recent phone conversation from The Wombats’ home base in Liverpool, England. “I wanted to show that we have more to give. We’re not really a one-dimensional band.”

“This Modern Glitch” still has its moments of breezy pop-punk – the song “Girls/Fast Cars,” for instance, is about, well, girls and fast cars – but it’s a little smarter than its predecessor, even when Murphy’s lyrics acknowledge intellectual limitations (“Astrophysics/You’ll never be my closest friend/I find no comfort/In what my mind can’t comprehend”). The heat of the electric guitar is tempered by liberal use of New Order-ish synthesizers throughout the album, and the band even incorporates Coldplay-like strings on the tune “Anti-D.”

Murphy said he’s been telling people the debut album is like “a Yorkshire terrier barking in your face for 13 songs.” The new one, he said, features a variety of dogs, only some of whom are getting in your face.

“By trying to do that it is going to sound more mature,” said Murphy, whose band plays Tuesday at Higher Ground. “Sometimes for bands it’s a bad thing to mature, but for us I think it was important.”

“This Modern Glitch” was co-produced by Rich Costey, a Grammy-winning native of Waterbury who also mixed The Wombats’ first album. Murphy appreciates the sound Costey draws out of bands.

“It’s very pop but also cool as well. I think Rich Costey’s got that balance perfectly,” he said of the producer for acts such as Foster the People, Jane’s Addiction and Franz Ferdinand who also mixed the new album “The Lion The Beast The Beat” by Waitsfield-based rockers Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. “With some producers it’s one or the other.”

Murphy also appreciates Costey’s personality. “I never knew he was from Vermont but we talked about a lot of stuff. He’s such a legendary guy,” Murphy said. “He’s just like a little introvert, he’s an introverted character. I like introverted producer types with the occasional bad temper.”